Acland’s Letters: Twelfth Letter
Niagara Falls
London, Upper Canada
Sept. 12, 1860
The day’s rich variety
No account of Mr. Woods, the Times’ own, nor of mine can really image to you our astonishing manner of life. Nor would the enumeration of the party of the General, the Colonels, the Aides de camp, the Ambassadors and Attachés, the Engineers, Attorney General & Politicians fully image the curious collection of men, manners & opinions implied by the word ‘we’ when I say we went. Well ‘we’ left Toronto this morning but not till the Prince returning from the ball which I would not go to had waked me up at half past four to look at a bruise which he had from a fall, which I half asleep rubbed with Arnica, he in full uniform, I in my shirt – the whole process being solely for the fun of calling me at 4:30 which of course I was not quick enough to see, and therefore insisted on assiduously rubbing – nor till I had my morning levee of a Professor, a Physician (Wilson & Hodder), and a Member of the Legislative Council (Mr. Cayley) conversing with all on the subject of the Medical Act11, which it is desirable to obtain for Canada.
In short the change is perpetual and it would require the method of a machine combined with its apathy to keep steady at anything.
* * * * *
I am sorry that the last ten days I have been unable from sheer pressure either of travelling fatigue, or the little daily tasks which become duties, to write. Today (Sept. 17) I had fully intended to write all the afternoon but there came a 15 mile ride – and cut it out – the morning had been given to a special drawing, my special gift of the journey for you. Tonight after dinner I had similar good intentions but there was a demand for skittles – and to skittles at 10 we went22 – to a curious big room, 80 feet long, at the back of the great Hotel – and played as heroes in Homer – H.R.H., Lord Hinchinbroke [Hinchingbrooke], Elliott, Gore, and General Commanding in Chief – On our side Sir Edmund Head (Governor General), Duke of Newcastle, Commodore, Grey and myself – The Game lasted an hour – we beat. We had ‘Sherry Cobbler’ to sip through straws – a great institution. It is now 11:30. I begged off to write to you, the 1st game ended – and they are at it again, the Duke from time to time signing State Papers on the Marking Board.
There is a ball overhead, where all the Niagarenes, visitors & others are tripping it to our band (the Canadian Rifles). So it goes – a lovely morning on a sullen rock, a negro by my side to warn me of rocks falling or rattle snakes crawling33 – a hard ride at full gallop – a state dinner – skittles – and a letter to you – and tomorrow betimes off. So it goes: the day to its work – the hour to its judged duties – often hard to fix upon – often laborious to execute nugae saepius labore plenae (full of labour often occupied on trifles) – yet full of interest – full of novelty – full of human kindness – full of discipline.
Musings at the falls
Ah! had you overheard the discourse when Sir Edmund & the Prince sat alone with me the other night – on the very edge of the Horse Shoe fall – The Aurora was shooting & gleaming overhead – the water within two yards of its final plunge into the abyss now & then plashed on our feet with its sullen headlong fling – and we saw but the white foam rising frightfully from below to throw a dim light on the black stream that surged by – and we asked who sat here 100 years ago – who will sit here a 100 years hence – will the Children of England be as now famous & strong – are they better or worse than in 1760 – what effect has their more cultivated life on them now – what will it on their children – how will the Era end in which for their pleasure and for his education the Heir to the throne thus crosses the Atlantic for the first time, and by mingled pleasure and duty, and labour makes his way into manhood – so questioning rather than discussing – so asking, but not answering we scarce hear the deep eternal roar which in material things supreme sinks below all human interest, and life – we staid – & rose & departed.
Thus you know we are at Niagara. In the year 1834, my dear Father gave me, bought at a book sale at Minehead, ‘Humboldt’s personal narrative’: it is now in my Library. This book inspired me with a strong wish to see the New World – In it there are two greatest phenomena. A tropical forest – and Niagara fall. I could scarcely believe this year I was to see the latter. But I have seen it. The sight far exceeds the imagination. No words can describe, no art pourtray it. I am satisfied no imagination can invent the majesty of the roll of waters – the biting energy of the oncoming rapids that are to hurl their volume down the precipice – nor can the ineffable grace of the composition, nor the sweet colour, and ever changing effect be made to flow from the pencil of a painter. Having said this most thankfully I must reserve my account of its details till God willing we look over my rough sketches by our fire side.
There are many points on which I might no doubt attempt to make words, and not without some result – But the result would be bad or deceptive – I have made careful notes of one or two remarkable facts in the way of falling of the water which you will share.
The one astounding point is the vast unbroken wave that pours over the tip a deep green and does not break, so great its mass, till hidden by the foam – and that this is an eminent peculiarity is shown by the fact that the vast American fall where the water is not as deep, is one sheet of pearl white foam some 1000 feet wide, and 150 deep.
The other very remarkable thing is the shaking of the earth – At night a long half mile off my windows unceasingly rattled, and a firm bedstead ever shook.
Not second in interest to Niagara has been my intercourse with the Indians.
…the schools are not advanced enough – whites would not care for them, or be elevated by them, they are too low. I have two sisters. My heart’s desire is to give them a good education. I cannot do it – I went myself all the way to Ohio, and lived on charity to attend the University – I became apprentice to a Shoemaker to get maintenance and then went back to my people & taught them what I learnt as well as I could.
Oronhyatekha
Some time since at Toronto, after I had seen & drawn many, and read & enquired much concerning them, there were standing one day in the passage two Indians – I accosted one, who answered rudely – I accosted the other who said “I do not speak much” – “Will you allow me to draw you?” “I do not much like it” – “Oh! never mind, I have drawn many: they never object, come to my room.” He slowly, but not sullenly, followed. He was a young man, herculean, with a large ring in his nose – and painted.44 I placed him & began to sketch. “Do you hunt or fish?” “Hunt never, fish, not often.” “What is the Indian for Pike? That is not the word always used – Sturgeon is Nama.” “Not in Mohawk, in Ojibbeway it may be so – But in my dialect which is Mohawk, there is no word which requires closing the lips – and therefore any person who knows Mohawk can at once eliminate a great many words such as Nama and say they cannot belong to Mohawk.” “Indeed,” I said, “then you have paid attention to the structure of your language” – “Certainly, I desire to be acquainted with whatever is of importance to my people” – “Are you a chief?” “I am a chief of the Mohawks.” “Is that hereditary or elective?” – “Sometimes one – sometimes the other, sometimes both as in my case” – “I am sure you will forgive me for asking you such a question – I am a stranger – and like to know all things – why do you wear a ring in your nose?” “I told you I take delight in all that concerns my people – this ring is part of the old, Indian dress.” “Well, but it is not a pleasant custom.” In a sad tone – “It is the custom – that is enough.” “But surely you do not mean to advocate every custom – you might now scalp me in no time.” “Certainly not – by coming to your room, you are my friend – I may and shall support all the customs of my people that are harmless, because I please them by so doing, and can therefore better aid them in their true elevation – and in all that will develop their intellectual faculties and raise their moral sense. For this reason I am indebted to Longfellow. His Hiawatha is intended to purify and perpetuate the Indian sentiment, and is an admirable purpose.”
“Really, Sir – I must beg your pardon – but first what may I call you?” “O-ron-hyat-eska” – “pray say it again – what is the English of it?” “‘Burning Cloud’” – “Well I was about to beg your pardon, Burning Cloud – I shall never say it in Indian – for having asked you to come to sit – (especially when I make you so ill looking) – But of course I could not know when I saw you what kind of mental cultivation you had – or I should not have thought it respectful to you – so pray forgive me now I cannot help it” – “The great draw-back which any Indian of real cultivation finds is that he is looked upon by the white men as an inferior being – Those even who are appointed by your Government to care for us look on us as children – and treat us so.55 As long as this is so there will be no real manhood” – “That is I daresay,” said I, “partly the fault of individual superintendents – partly your own – tell me now what else depresses your race.” – “I should say the condition of our women – No cultivated Indian can find in his tribe a suitable wife – and no superior white woman will marry an Indian.”
“What is the remedy? – You have schools provided for you – and few go to them – and when they do go, they run away, and the parents do not care.”
“That is true – but the schools are not advanced enough – whites would not care for them, or be elevated by them, they are too low. I have two sisters. My heart’s desire is to give them a good education. I cannot do it – I went myself all the way to Ohio, and lived on charity to attend the University – I became apprentice to a Shoemaker to get maintenance and then went back to my people & taught them what I learnt as well as I could.”
“I think I can help you in more than one way – But my friend you had to leave by a train at 4. It is now 3:30. I have spoiled my drawing – Be gone & God bless you – write to me your thoughts & your wishes – I will do anything for you,66 except give money – and that I cannot – Good bye.”
“Your red brother thanks you: you will hear.”
At their first meeting in 1860, as Acland painted the six-foot Mohawk in ceremonial clothing he discovered an exceptional nineteen-year-old man who represented a second religious community on the Six Nations Reserve distinct from that of his companion, a Cayuga chief who espoused a reformed Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) religious teaching.
During their conversation, Oronhyatekha countered the Indian Department’s two options for First Nations peoples: either segregation or assimilation.
A tentative direction to Oronhyatekha’s career began with Acland’s offer to help him.
Cayuga chief
This evening at 7 ‘Burning Cloud’ who had written to me at Niagara, walked into my room. There was sitting with me a Chief of the Cayugas, at tea. It was a strange party: the stately and philosophic ‘Cloud’ on one side – the illiterate, wiry active Cayuga on the other – His chin resting on his hand eyeing me – his hair black & hard as horse hair tied tall over his crown, a handle for his enemy to scalp him – a bow & arrows on the table cloth – and the peaceful Doctor between the two. The Cayuga had been seized to be drawn as the ‘Cloud’ had been – very different were they. The Cayuga a real child of the Red Men – and nothing more – and yet a true man. Hear his talk – you shall have one sentence. “You say Indian men no work – why not – Indian wish do what God of Indian bid him – God of Indian said, “have forests – have deer – have fur – and hunt” – and Indian do it well. God of White men say “dig and be farmer, and have town, & railroad” and all that – and he do it – but why white man come cut down forests & drive away deer and all animals and then say Indian no work when Indian no place for hunt.
The Cayuga went away: he would not sell me an ornament – for it was his wife’s he said – and O-ron-hyat-eska staid. He has remained the whole evening, while I unravelled the laws under which the Indians live – sought to know what is to be done for them – reasoned with him against his too great confidence in the wisdom of “preserving his nationality” and in introducing him to the Governor General.
Here at Hamilton there is a great Agricultural show. The ‘Times’ will tell you much. Tomorrow we start for Detroit and Chicago. We sail humanly speaking for certain on the 20th to reach England, November 2nd or 3rd.
Contextualized Notes
Like at Quebec, in Toronto Acland discussed the importance of passing a Medical Act to prevent quackery and incompetence through regulating the licensing of practitioners. He spoke on this subject with Dr Hodder, an eminent Toronto physician, Professor Daniel Wilson, the University of Toronto professor and ethnologist, and William Cayley, a seasoned provincial politician. After the Medical Act was passed in the United Kingdom in 1858, Acland himself had been actively involved in the regulation of physicians as the Oxford member of the General Medical Council.
The royal party’s three-day respite at Niagara Falls was meant as a break from the continuous, exhausting demands of processions, addresses, levees, balls, and formal dinners before their departure for a whirlwind tour of the United States. At Niagara Falls, they enjoyed tourist attractions such as an excursion on the Maid of the Mist and the very first illumination of the falls, unreported by Acland, which was achieved through luminous white and blood-red flares (Bengal lights used as flares aboard ships) placed dramatically behind the falls and under the cliffs. At Clifton House, a grand resort hotel that featured nightly balls, the royal party enjoyed indoor bowling, a game first introduced in New York City in 1840. The two teams included the Prince of Wales’ young companions, Lord Hinchingbrooke (later the Earl of Sandwich) and Charles Eliot, youngest son of the Earl of St Germains; one of the prince’s equerries, Captain Charles Grey; General William Fenwick Williams, Commander-in-Chief of the British Forces in North America; and Captain George H. Seymour, commodore of the royal squadron. Their fashionable iced drinks called sherry cobblers had come into vogue after new techniques for shipping and storing ice developed in the 1830s.
While Acland painted a special picture of Niagara Falls for Sarah, he had a Black companion, one of about 250 Blacks in Niagara Falls in 1860. Some were attracted by work in the tourist industry; others arrived at Niagara Falls as the terminus for escaped slaves smuggled at night across the border by Harriet Tubman, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In Canada, slaves found safety because in 1815 the young attorney general, John Beverley Robinson, had ruled against the extradition of run-away slaves as contrary to the civil rights protection afforded by the law of England. Pressure had intensified since 1850 when the Fugitive Slave Act in the United States awarded a bounty for recapturing run-away slaves. In his letters written from the United States just months before the outbreak of civil war, Acland described the uneasy feeling of staying at a Virginia plantation, a visit to dismal slave auction rooms, and attending a deeply-moving, Black church service. He reported the views on slavery of both a plantation owner and of a slave, read current theories justifying slavery, and articulated its moral abhorrence.
At their first meeting in 1860, as Acland painted the six-foot Mohawk in ceremonial clothing he discovered an exceptional nineteen-year-old man who represented a second religious community on the Six Nations Reserve distinct from that of his companion, a Cayuga chief who espoused a reformed Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) religious teaching. Oronhyatekha (Peter Martin) was representative of those who accepted Protestant Christianity and promoted social adjustment especially through education in English. Acland learned that Oronhyatekha was a graduate of an Episcopal liberal arts college in Ohio (Kenyon College) and was familiar with Longfellow’s Hiawatha who, in Haudenosaunee legend, was a charismatic Mohawk or Onandaga orator instrumental in persuading the original Five Nations to band together as the Haudenosaunee confederacy. The young Mohawk spoke in the idiom of the liberally-educated in the period as he made references to the moral sense and the development of the intellectual faculties through education. He also had a philological knowledge of Mohawk which in 1865 led to the publication of the first of his two articles in the Canadian Journal entitled “The Mohawk Language.”
During their conversation, Oronhyatekha countered the Indian Department’s two options for First Nations peoples: either segregation or assimilation. Government policy, which Acland accepted, was based on the prevalent belief that there was no viable future for the traditional Indigenous way of life and that Indigenous people had to reject their identity to follow the sweeping current of civilization and progress. Some government officials also assumed that Indigenous people would die out, a belief supported by the ravages of diseases like smallpox. Recent government policy stipulated that Indigenous people could retain their Indian identity only if they lived separately on communally-owned land on Reserves. To own property in their own right, they had to renounce their Indian status. Rather than accepting either segregation on a reserve or assimilation and a loss of identity, Oronhyatekha asserted a third option: acculturation and integration into mainstream society as Indigenous people.
He maintained this position in his address to the Prince of Wales when the royal train stopped at Brantford by invoking the 1764 Silver Covenant Chain, or the Treaty of Niagara. The several links in the chain represent the twenty-four Indigenous nations who in 1764 affirmed a diplomatic covenant with the Crown, not as subjects but as sovereign nations in their own right. Similarly, in his conversation with Acland, Oronhyatekha demonstrated cultural pride in his defense of the customs represented in his ceremonial dress and in his appreciation of the Mohawk language. He also indicated to Acland the Indigenous understanding of hospitality, a relationship of mutuality comparable to the reciprocity in the act of gift-giving and understood as implicit in Acland’s invitation to go to his room. Throughout his spectacularly successful life, Oronhyatekha continued to maintain this same cultural pride, retaining the use of his Mohawk name and insisting that Mohawk should be spoken in his family home.
A tentative direction to Oronhyatekha’s career began with Acland’s offer to help him. Through Acland’s subsequent support regarding accreditation for Oronhyatekha’s studies at Kenyon College and finding financial aid, in 1862 Oronhyatekha studied briefly at St Edmund’s Hall, Oxford, where his portrait still hangs as Oxford’s first Aboriginal student. After he returned to Canada, in 1864 he embarked on medical studies, becoming a pioneer Aboriginal graduate from Toronto’s School of Medicine. However, he found his niche not as a physician but as the flamboyant, innovative head of the International Order of Foresters, a fraternal, mutual-aid society which he rescued from the verge of bankruptcy and made one of the period’s most successful insurance companies. During business travels to expand the International Order of Foresters in other countries, he collected thousands of items which, along with his collection of Canadian Indigenous artefacts and natural history specimens, became the foundational collection of the Royal Ontario Museum when it opened in 1912. Like Acland at Oxford, then, Oronhyatekha was also an important figure in the founding of a museum.
The esteem and life-long friendship that developed between Oronhyatekha and Henry Acland is reflected in Ornonhyatekha’s choice of names for two of his children: Acland and Henry. This long relation with Acland is recorded, first, in Acland’s watercolour portrait of him in 1860 and, finally, in a photograph in 1896 in which Oronhyatekha, genial, tall, and imposing, stands by Acland, then elderly and frail, seated in the garden of his Oxford home.